References

Books & Media

Clark, Christopher and Nancy A. Hewitt. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History. Volume I, third edition. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2008. A survey of the nation’s history from the perspective of the transformations wrought by the changing nature and forms of work and the role that working people played in the making of modern America. Used to write the historical background.

Foner, Eric and John Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1991. Article on Free Negroes, 1619-1860, by Ira Berlin. In one readable and accessible volume this book covers political, economic, cultural, and social history; it combines short descriptive entries with longer in-depth essays. Used to write the historical background.

Lester, Julius. To Be a Slave. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1968. Particularly useful for MS and ES school students (if entries selected and read by teachers), this book is based on the extensive collection of slave narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project at the Library of Congress as well as 19th century interviews with abolitionists.

Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. An HBO Documentary Film in association with the Library of Congress, introduced by Ira Berlin, 2003. Based on oral histories from the Federal Writers Project and visual sources from the Library of Congress, entries are read by a range of well-know actors.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html The PBS four-part program from 1450 to 1865, each with a historical narrative, a resource bank of images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries, and a teacher's guides